A Night at the Asylum (16 page)

We went through another set of double doors
and a long corridor with rooms on each side stretched out before
us. Plaster sloughed off the ceiling and a stack of rebar had
toppled near an ancient bedframe that jutted out from a doorway.
Some sort of sinister-looking tubing snaked out of another. This
hallway was one arm of another L-shaped corridor further down; the
wings were staggered in the typical Kirkbride tradition as part of
a belief that it was healthier for the patients to have a clear
view of the sun and the outside. It also kept the more violent
patients in the furthest wings, isolated from the others. I
remembered all these strange facts from that report I’d done in
seventh grade, the one I’d submitted the pictures with. Maybe
someday I’d pick up a camera again, and try to make something out
of myself.

Raymond’s phone made a noise and he pulled it
out of his pocket, stopping in the middle of the hallway. “It’s
Cole,” he announced. “My signal must be going in and out. Great.”
He read the message aloud. “Can’t find Sara. Jamie is asking for
her.” He looked up at me and shrugged, reading his return message
while he quickly punched it in. “Where are you? Sara is with
me.”

His words made me feel stronger. I was not
alone. We had to keep going. Here where the hallway was a bit less
strewn with debris, we were able to break into a sort of half-jog.
The sense of urgency was bearing down progressively harder on us.
There were stragglers here and there, and even a couple that looked
like Jamie and Cole from the back, shock on their faces when we
whirled them around and zapped them with the flashlight.
Frustrated, we continued on.

Another set of double doors opened into the
farthest wing of the first floor Men’s Ward. Things were bad here
again, dirty. Graffiti (not even particularly imaginable) blanketed
the walls. Some of the doors had been torn from their hinges. This
was not evidence of the medically macabre; this was proof of the
chronically undereducated. The light would have been good here
except for the arrival of the storm. Everything was washed in
blue-gray.

The crashing of the thunder reminded me of
the beginning of this whole fiasco – the nightmare about Tommy.
Emmett was dying in the car. Jamie needed me. I was one lost marble
away from a complete meltdown. I could feel it coming on. I pulled
out my cell phone but there was still no signal. Raymond checked
his. Nothing. “This isn’t working,” I muttered, breaking away from
Raymond. I tore back around the corner past the empty rooms, back
through the double doors that led us toward the nurses’
station.

Without restraint I began to run. “Jamie!” I
screamed. “Cole!” Raymond was trying to catch up to me, begging me
to stop. But I couldn’t. Lightning was flashing in the windows,
thunder rolling all around us. I was going to lose every shred of
sanity I had left if I didn’t find them. I stumbled upon the
bathrooms, the rectangular tubs and vacant shower stalls filthy
with scattered remnants of insulation and chunks of broken tiles.
As I flew around the corner and tried to slide to a stop, I twisted
my ankle on a pile of trash and caught myself on the edge of one of
the tubs, my face inches from making intimate contact.
I’m going
to throw up,
I thought suddenly, as I pulled myself into a
sitting position, perching on the side of the tub with my head
between my knees. My ankle throbbed with pain and the floor tilted
below me dizzily. The panic rose in my throat, and I gulped air to
snuff it out.
Please, Tommy,
I spoke desperately inside my
own head. My anxiety renewed my desperation that he hear me if he
was out there. It was strange to have unquestioningly, finally
acquiesced to raw hope.
Please, just show me how to get to
Jamie.
Please just show me where to go.

My breathing was returning to normal, and the
nausea was finally subsiding. I picked my head up, staring out of
the shower room into the hall. Raymond came bailing around the
corner. “Sara, are you okay? Don’t run off like that! It’s
dangerous in here! I almost broke my neck on that—” He cut off,
mid-sentence, following my gaze out of the room. “What are you
looking at?”

I stood, not as shaky as I expected to be,
and crept toward the shower room door. I took six steps, my eyes
locked on a playing card that rested, face up, in the middle of the
dirty floor. Even though it was surrounded by filth, it was
perfect, clean and gleaming white. It was the ace of spades.

My sneakers crunched over broken glass as I
kneeled to pick it up. I turned it over. It was a red-backed
Bicycle card.

I looked at Raymond. “We need to go this
way,” I said.

His eyes held questions, but he kept quiet.
We walked through the bathroom and back out to the double doors
that led to the outermost ward, moving in a straight line. We
crossed the ward in a few minutes, noticing that most of the rooms
were empty of furniture. At the very back of the wing was another
set of steps, adjoining a kind of cloak room which had a set of
toppled lockers barricading the doorway. I started up the steps,
uncertain whether I was headed the right way. That’s when I found
another card, the ace of diamonds. Again, it was on the floor in
perfect condition, as if it had just been placed there.

“Come on, we have to hurry,” I called down to
Raymond, who was maneuvering past a rubber fire hose to catch up.
He took the steps two at a time. “Show off,” I grumbled as we
reached the top together.

It was dark now, a full-blown storm swirling
outside. I wondered about the crowds – the protesters, the cops,
the demolition crew. Were they still out there?

A calm had come over me, negating my panic
from earlier, giving me the strength to go on. We shoved through
the double doors that would take us to the second floor Men’s
Ward.

In spite of my serenity, this hallway was the
creepiest thing I’d seen since the morgue. There was grime two
inches thick on the walls, and the floor tiles had been plucked out
of their places like randomly extracted teeth. I took a deep breath
and tried to fill the eerie silence with inane conversation. “So…is
it my fault?” I asked Raymond as we took in the leaking ceiling,
dirty floors, crackled paint.

He clicked the flashlight on. “Is what your
fault?” he replied, his eyes warily following the yellow sphere of
light.

“You know…”

He looked at me. “Really?” he replied.

“You know I had to ask.”

“Well, you are pretty gross,” he answered. He
grinned widely, nudging me with his shoulder, but kept his eyes on
the hallway. It was like a zombie apocalypse had taken this place
down, and any second some gory-faced monster was going to come
stumbling sloppily toward us. “Do I really have a small penis?” he
asked, only a trace of uncertainty on his handsome face.

I laughed. I had never seen Raymond
self-conscious about anything. “Sorry about that. Of course not.
But…you might want to get a guy’s opinion…you know…to be fair.” I
nudged him back.

He laughed, rolling his eyes. Me and him, we
were gonna be alright. “Let’s go.”

At the end of the hall, at the entrance to
the next, was another playing card. This time it was the ace of
clubs. I thought we might be going toward the nurses’ station, but
I found another card just outside the entrance to the tiny open
dining hall. It was the ace of hearts.

Rummy.

And there was my best friend, Jamie, her back
to me as she sat at the last dining table left standing in the
room. She was immersed in shadows and I could vaguely make out
Cole’s outline beside her, huddled in another chair. Raymond shined
the light on him. His eyes were raw, disbelieving. He motioned us
over.

“So, what’s going on?” Raymond asked. I
pulled a chair over from a pile in the corner, and it squeaked
loudly under my weight.

“I have been waiting for you, Sara,” said a
male voice, from out of the dark. I looked around, bewildered. I
almost asked who it was until I realized where it was coming
from.

The voice was coming from Jamie’s mouth.

“See what I mean?” Cole whimpered.

“What the hell,” breathed Raymond.

Raymond pointed the flashlight at Jamie, and
her face changed as she turned her head toward me. I’d never seen
anything quite like this before; it was immensely disturbing. It
was almost her, only slightly off. As if someone else were using
her facial expressions. “Jamie?” I asked. “Is that you?” It was a
useless question.

“I am not Jamie, and no harm will come to
this body. It has hosted me before. I am Jamie’s guide here as
well,” said the male voice, low and deep, ancient…terrifying. “I am
a guide to those who have crossed the line between your world and
mine. You know me, Sara.” There was a low growl in its tone. “You
know my name.” Jamie’s moist eyes, flat and emotionless, locked on
mine.

“Who?” I asked. “Who are you?”

“I am Joey,” the voice said.

****

Nine O’Clock

I jumped back so abruptly that I knocked over
my chair. “What’s going on?!” I demanded. I was asking no one in
particular.

“There is no reason to be afraid,” the male
voice coming out of Jamie rasped. “I am not here to hurt you. I am
here to impart truth.”

“What is she talking about?” Raymond asked
me, his eyes wide. He leaned down to look her in the face.

“Don’t touch her,” Cole warned. Just as the
words left his lips Jamie emitted a low, threatening, inhuman
growl. Raymond stepped back. “I already tried that,” Cole said. He
held his wrist under the flashlight, showing us three long, jagged
scratch marks.

“She did that to you?” I gasped.

“
It
did that to me, yes,” Cole
answered.

“Don’t tell me you’re buying into this,”
Raymond mumbled, but he looked totally convinced. He was scared.
And that made me scared. “Jamie.” Raymond leaned down to look at
her again, but kept his distance this time. She turned her head
ever so slightly to look at him. Her eyes glowed strangely in the
dark. “Hey, girl,” he said in a gentle whisper. “Are you ready to
get out of here?”

Again, the low rumbling growl answered, like
a cat gone mad.

“What should we do?” Raymond asked Cole.

“I don’t know. If we try to pick her up…”

“She needs a doctor…something isn’t right
here…”

“You think? She tried to tear my arm off and
that voice coming out of her…”

As the guys argued about how to get Jamie out
of the building without having their faces ripped off, I paced back
and forth. Neither one of them knew what I knew. I was a bundle of
nerves, a mass of conflicting emotions. Part of me wanted to know
why The Thing was here. Part of me wanted to strangle Jamie just to
shut it up. Instead I started talking to it. Raymond and Cole both
went silent and stared at me. “What do you want, Joey?” I
demanded.

“I am here to remind you of the information
you have about Thomas and Jenevieve,” Joey answered immediately
with Jamie’s lips. It was so strange; her mouth barely moved, but
each word was fully articulated, clear and deliberate. “And I am
here to remind you that there are items in your world which have
significance to the two I speak of now who have crossed over into
the fluid world.”

I folded my arms over my chest. If there was
any inkling this was a joke, I would beat the crap out of her, and
she knew it. She had, after all, fooled the mayor’s wife with one
of her goofy voices. I paced again.

I knew it couldn’t be a joke.

“Who’s Jenevieve?” Raymond asked,
frowning.

“That’s my sister,” Cole breathed, his eyes
round as saucers.

Jamie couldn’t have known that, could she?
Even Raymond and I hadn’t known that. “What items?” I demanded,
answering because I didn’t know what else to do.

“Sara, what is she talking about?” Cole was
frantic.

“I don’t know!” I screamed, my hands flying
out helplessly. Then I remembered the necklace in my pocket. “Are
you talking about this?” I pulled it out, holding it up in front of
Jamie, the gold glinting in the light of the flashlight.

“Where did you get that?” Cole gasped.

“Is this what you’re talking about?” I
shouted again, ignoring him. “Joey”…or whatever it was, wasn’t
answering. The son of a bitch had no people skills. Instead, it
uttered an eerie chuckle, the same one I’d heard on the phone when
Cole had called me earlier. Furious, I took my messenger bag off my
shoulders and emptied its contents on the table; the spirit board,
the recorder, and the notebook tumbled messily into a pile. “Which
one? Goddamn you, answer me!”

“Sara! Where did you get that necklace?!”
Cole shouted.

At the same time, Raymond was trying to
convince us both to calm down. “Tell us what’s going on, Sara,” he
said gently. “Please.”

Lightning flashed, and the rumble of thunder
followed.

The low, infuriating chuckle continued to
come out of Jamie. I marched back and forth some more, pondering.
Could I tell Raymond and Cole what I knew? Would they think I was
insane? On the bright side, it was unlikely I would sound any
crazier than Joey. I could no longer handle all of this alone. And
who better to tell? I could trust them, but not only that, they
deserved to know. After all, they had loved Jenny too. They had
both suffered along with me. We were all in this together.

I could have started out with logic, but it
was all going to sound nuts anyway. So I decided blurting would be
the most effective means of communication. “I think Ead killed
Jenny.” I grimaced as Cole’s face crumpled. I hated to hurt him
like this, but it had to be told. “And this necklace is the proof.
Tommy found it in Ead’s car.”